New & Notable

“How do you keep going when you want to curl up into a ball and never leave your bedroom? How do you squeeze all the joy out of life while dealing with all the messy parts? How can you find a calling that fills you up, gives you a sense of purpose and your life meaning, and doesn’t leave you feeling full of regret and remorse? … These are questions we all ask ourselves at one time or another. I know I have. But I’ve always found comfort and guidance in hearing from people who have wrestled with the same questions and, through the simple act of living, have found their own versions of the right answers.”
—Katie Couric (Col ’79), excerpt from The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons from Extraordinary Lives

“Power Ballads began as a sort of love letter to all the amazing, unheralded musicians I’ve met over the years, but that was really only the jumping-off point. The core of each story has to do with particular emotional problems—what it is to be tone deaf to your own feelings and the feelings of others, to be able to hear one kind of music and not another.”
—Will Boast (Grad ’07), author of Power Ballads

Michelle Cuevas

“An orphan boy grows up on the back of an elephant. Not any elephant, but one who paints. When the boy turns 10, they travel together across the world in search of lost parents, marvelous paintings and an acrobat with whom the elephant fell in love years before.”
—Michelle Cuevas (Grad ’09), author of The Masterwork of a Painting Elephant

“There is a lot more happening in trees than we normally see. I started taking small parts of trees, like flowers, buds, leaves and fruit, back to my studio and photographing them up close. I make up to 50 exposures at different focus points of one object and then stitch the images together in computer software. It’s much like making a panorama with multiple images, but going vertically with focus.”
—Robert Llewellyn (Engr ’69), his photographs appear in Seeing Trees: Discover the Extraordinary Secrets of Everyday Trees